Best PC applications

[friedchicken]

DVD: DVDDecrypter for ripping & burning images, CCE for compression.
CD/DVD burning: Infra Recorder (standalone free).
Image mounting: DAEMON Tools.
Music conversion/playback: foobar2000.
Video playback: WMP classic + CCCP. PowerDVD for BD/HDDVD
Virus scan: AVG Free.
BT: uTorrent.
Compression: winrar

 

[Mortenga]

DVD/CD Burning: Windows media player

Music: iTunes
BT: uTorrent
Video Playback: Windows media player
Virus Scan: Avast!

 

[Mortenga]

DVD/CD Burning: Windows media player

Music: iTunes
BT: uTorrent
Video Playback: Windows media player
Virus Scan: Avast!



It made my post twice...?

Moderator delete this second one?

 

[azndragonguy115]

is it smart to convert DVD to AVI or whatever or just back it up with dvd shrink?

 

[Veho]

Al Morale, the virtual yes-man

A virtual ass-kisser, that sits on your desktop and praises you, compliments your looks, raves about your work, goes extatic over your ideas, and even laughs at your jokes

Some of the most shameless, blatant flattery you can get from an underling, without the backstabbing tendencies

The full version is hilarious.

 

[FAST6191]

@azndragonguy115
DVDshrink is a transcoder/basic reauthoring app so you can drop extra menus, audio tracks, extras..... as well as reduce the size (and so quality) and ultimately play it back on just about every player going (assuming it supports DVD- whatever).
On the other hand there are re-encoders that can do the same thing but as they re-encode the quality is often higher (as is the time taken). DVD rebuilder is a good start for such an app although for certain things it is not quite as friendly as shrink/recode.

AVI is a container and it is more the codecs that are put into it that matter, most often this will be MPEG4-ASP the most common being divx and xvid. Quality is about as good as DVD if done correctly (MPEG2 is a fairly bad standard from a compression point of view). There are a fair few players available but certainly not as many as DVD. On the other hand I can send you an AVI file quite easily and the same is true in reverse, DVD files are a bit more tricky though.

 

[CatScam]

Total Commander, that’s it. I don’t need anything else.

 

[azndragonguy115]

@azndragonguy115
DVDshrink is a transcoder/basic reauthoring app so you can drop extra menus, audio tracks, extras..... as well as reduce the size (and so quality) and ultimately play it back on just about every player going (assuming it supports DVD- whatever).
On the other hand there are re-encoders that can do the same thing but as they re-encode the quality is often higher (as is the time taken). DVD rebuilder is a good start for such an app although for certain things it is not quite as friendly as shrink/recode.

AVI is a container and it is more the codecs that are put into it that matter, most often this will be MPEG4-ASP the most common being divx and xvid. Quality is about as good as DVD if done correctly (MPEG2 is a fairly bad standard from a compression point of view). There are a fair few players available but certainly not as many as DVD. On the other hand I can send you an AVI file quite easily and the same is true in reverse, DVD files are a bit more tricky though.

i'm still kind of confused about what to do. I like DVD quality but can i get it with a AVI file or another common format. I like the factor of having 25+ eps of a tv show on a dvd but should i just get dual layer DVD and copy them that way, thus keeping it the way it was?

 

[FAST6191]

DVDshrink can almost always leave you with no need for dual layer.

As for maintaining DVD quality assuming your machine(s) can take it you might want to look into H264 codecs with AAC audio (save the encodes that have to be (i.e. they are for someone else) all mine are x264 with neros aac in mkv), you can not reasonably use them in AVI though.
With regards to space my 40 min long encodes (i.e a TV episode) are 350 megs (I used constant bitrate just to test) @ 640x512 res and I do not feel the need to watch them with post processing. My film encodes (I did the Warrior king (a nice high action martial arts film) to test it can be CD size with the same res and to the untrained eye DVDs are the same, with post processing they are effectively the same.
The only downside is that they take a hell of a long time to encode even on a powerful machine (I normally do two pass encodes and it took my old laptop 18 hours to do 3 episodes, xvid would have likely done the entire 15 eps series) and the specs to decode are pretty steep as well, searching is your friend here but if your processor is P3 or older you are pretty much out of luck.

There are several almost fully automated (from DVD to as well as whatever file to) encoder GUIs, my favourite being meGUI (requires .net though) although I suggest you poke around http://forum.doom9.org/ and http://www.free-codecs.com/ as well as many of the other big video sites if you want another.